Not a Date
by meatsuit
Summary: After her drunken tumble down a flight of stairs, Rose rambles to Kanaya for a change. Rose/Kanaya.


Your name is Kanaya Maryam, and this is the most surreal experience of your life.

You suppose you've encountered worse. For example, you willingly submitted yourself to a game that obliterated your universe. The sole survivors of your race were banished to an abandoned meteor where the oppressive silence and stagnant air drove all of you stir-crazy within hours. Now half of your friends are dead, and interfering in their murders got your spine blown out and your species' last hope for survival destroyed.

A devastating series of events, sure, but not strange at all. In retrospect, nothing was as jarring as the way Rose is looking at you now, her breath hot with the stink of human alcohol. Just a few hours ago she tip-toed around the subject of your phosphorescence; now she's racing through so many ideas so quickly her numbed lips have trouble keeping up with them.

Somehow Rose stumbling into you and talking "quadrans" is more exceptional than the moment you met her. The girl from the universe you had personally engineered, the human with pale skin whose prose held you captive before you knew her name, greeted you as a god the day you thought you had lost everything. She told you, with the wishy-washy authority of a seer player, that all hope of fulfilling your sacred duty was not lost. You later realized she said that just to convince you to stay and keep her company. Two years traveling through the uncharted void and nothing on this cramped rock has helped you reclaim the matriorb. Instead you've developed a habit of following Rose through the corridors, providing her with light for her weak diurnal eyes to see by. Also, companionship.

Today, someone else roused your optimism. All of Porrim's confident seniority has assuaged your anxiety over propagating the troll race, though the conditions for success are presently out of reach. Her other gift isn't as inspiring as it is useful. You had thought the ability to turn yourself off would encourage you to better embrace the gloom; instead you learned your complexion had washed out from two years of oppressive darkness. Your face in the mirror, no longer obstructed by its own luminescence, had stared like a stranger as you pressed your fingers into skin you're certain was covered with freckles before. You ached, then, to return to the oasis you had cultivated yourself, to bask in the daylight and breathe the scorching desert wind that would fill your whole hive with the sound of rustling leaves.

This is the kind of homesickness you've learned to keep to yourself. You don't expect Karkat nor Terezi to empathize, not with her daylight-inflicted blindness and his rigid conformity to nocturnal normalcy. They miss Alternia in different ways.

You tried to approach the subject over breakfast once, waxing nostalgic over how the sun used to warm your skin as you tended to your garden. Rose was the only other person in attendance, as usual. She was methodically picking all of the grubs out of the grubsauce you had alchemized and hummed sympathetically as she scraped them onto your nutrition plateau. "I miss home, too," she said, aggressively sopping a slice of grubloaf in the remaining slime, "but the darkness hasn't bothered me as much as I imagined it would." As if she had told a riddle, she smiled at you, sly, and suddenly you felt very stupid for assuming a Derse Dreamer, even a human one, would ever eschew the shadows of the Veil.

These civilized breakfasts are an important cornerstone of your mutual routine. Your afternoons, however, are variable. Most days, Rose researches with you. Occasionally she'll hunch over the alchemiter or scribble in a notebook and you'll sit on the other side of the room, alternately squinting at your sewing machine and staring at the ceiling. When you want to be alone you sequester yourself in your pile and think of new fabrics to alchemize or study the way your skin throws shadows across your block. Sometimes you rope Karkat into helping you clean the rugs in the common block, baiting him with a willing ear. Every once in a while Terezi announces she needs you for an "emergency textile consultation" and you spend the rest of the evening making fabric forts in Can Town. You get along famously with the Mayor now that you've learned to leave the green stuff in your sylladex. Sometimes Rose pulls you along as she explores the meteor for secret rooms and hidden stashes of literature. She didn't ask why you refused to step onto the transportalizer labeled with Vriska's symbol. She doesn't ask you many questions at all.

You suspect she stifles her curiosity to better adhere to the single unspoken rule standing between the both of you: always, always avoid discussing your feelings for each other.

At least she evades quadrant talk with you. You figured this reluctance was related to something she said a long time ago about staying out of "troll interpersonal politics." This would be a reasonable abstinence if she didn't violate it on a daily basis.

The morning Rose kissed you on the cheek and whispered, "Thank you," upon finding you watering the flowers you considered it a revolutionary admission; a few hours later Dave dropped a sweat-stained musclebeast poster into her lap and she replicated the gesture. You noticed the way Rose's "thank you" dripped with sarcasm as her brother wiped the lipstick off his face. You don't think she said it the same way to you. Maybe she was sincere when it was you, but the kiss meant something different than you thought it did. Maybe you don't understand humans at all.

Rose is always vague like this, and her subtlety frustrates all of your attempts to parse her behavior towards you. There is certainly no precedent for Rose Lalonde waxing inexplicably poetic. Now Dave says she's human drunk because she was nervous about your evening together, and her behavior seems to corroborate this explanation. Bizarre. Rose, blatant enough to establish this as a definitive date? Rose, nervous?

She's on the subject of you, lauding you as a teacher of the romantic arts, and you can barely comprehend what, exactly, she wants to learn. Your internal monologue's given up completely, helplessly repeating "I should, I should, I should...?" as she grabs your arm and pulls you into her. As soon as you freeze, Rose drops. You don't notice the stairs beneath you until you see her skull crack against them.

It doesn't take long to determine the most optimal course of action. Despite your insane fastness attribute, Rose is perched on the bottom step and gracelessly rearranging her headband by the time you reach her.

"I enjoyed that!" she says, and beams at you like your first kiss wasn't interrupted by an entire flight of stairs. You worry this nonchalance is evidence of the vast extent of her blunt force trauma. When you kneel next to her she lifts her eyebrows and leans forward, as if she is inviting you to decipher a profound secret she is concealing in her expression.

"This is no time to gaze into the mysterious wells of your cutting amethyst eyes unless I'm checking them for asymmetrical dilation," you tell her. It is unfortunate how much the symptoms of Moderately Joggled Thinkpan Sickness mirror the effects of Rose's experimental human intoxicants. At least you can skip the step addressing horn abrasion.

Rose whines, "Stahp fussing!" and starts pulling at your hands as you inspect her throat stem for injury. "I'm, fine. I don't feel anneighthing! I'm god tire, 'member?" You drag her hands to her lap every time she grabs you until she learns her protests won't deter you from applying your practical knowledge of first aid. "Donlet this distact is from our evening, Kamaya. I'm good. Better!"

"Rose," you sigh. "The quantity of soporifics you've consumed are probably numbing your senses. You're not acting like yourself. Of course I'm concerned."

Rose narrows her already half-lidded eyes at you. Just yesterday you watched her squinting like this at books you had found collecting dust in the bowels of the meteor, filled with paragraph after paragraph of nothing but numerical representations of colors in hexadecimal format. As you illuminated the pages for her, Rose leaned into your shoulder and let your thighs touch. You were the first to point out how the color codes were arranged in complementary pairs and she'd laughed, made some comment about "culturally ordained hue consciousness." Now you are astounded by the epiphany that Rose may find you as obfuscating as the puzzles you pour over together.

She hesitates before abruptly leaning forward and trying to catch your hands again. "Kananay, rememember when I said I don't feel anyshing? That wasntrue."

"I shall never forgive myself if I am responsible for your untimely demise," you sniff, double-checking the back of her head for the candy-red color of her blood.

"No, nooooooooo, no. I feel allot of things annon of them are stair-inflected injurees. Itsch- HIC- you. In my genderal proximbty. Not jest when I'm compormised like this! Alwayeys. "

She almost sways as she stares at you, smoothing a wrinkle your skirt with a queer tenderness. You are beginning to suspect Rose Lalonde is not nearly as deliberate an actor as she presents herself. In the haze of exhaustion after you were banished here, the girl on your screen spoke with such arch wit and moved with such dangerous grace you assumed she meticulously calculated every action. You retained this image of her even as you spent two years in her company, watching her tease her brother, laughing with her over the quadrant flipper she stole out of Karkat's hand. Every time Rose had said a sentimental word to you and immediately distanced herself with diffusing irony- were these mistakes to her?

All of her blather about you and your date is sounding too sincere to deflect any longer, but you are still not sure how a human suitor would conventionally behave in response to this kind of inebriated confession. You look away from her as you search for the words.

"Oh my GOD," Rose wails. You suppose she is not very patient in this state. "I am morl than complately sincere, Kanaya! I jus, made a misstack. In waitig to tell you until I gosshitfazed. I means it and I'all say it tomorrowor, more comprehensiblbley if less braschenly. I'd like it if you, um. Were my girlfrien. Or I can be your, matesprit? I said it corerectly! Kanannaya, will you have me as your matesprite? Matesprit."

Rose is flushing pink with earnestness, and she's so close it feels as if the moisture in her breath is condensing on your cheek. She's avoiding looking directly at you now and it's weird. You can feel your chitinous windhole clenching shut. "Um. Maybe," you hear yourself choke, despite what you imagine is every cell in your body protesting their assent. You're stalling, fixing Rose's hair for her. You're mortified to discover a blush this deep slightly modifies the cast of your light: you do want her, and you're certain she knows it already. Rose had taken a risk disclosing her feelings to you and it's time you did the same.

Breathing out, you steady yourself and tuck a lock of her hair behind her ear. "Yes," you say. "I'd like that."

Rose immediately throws her arms around your shoulders and you laugh at her display, suddenly giddy. She's giggling the whole way through, but her second kiss is blessedly uninterrupted. Her acrid breath smells of something unspeakable and you almost forget how exactly you're supposed to breathe and you're concerned about Rose's lack of control over her salivary glands, but you don't care about any of it. Your girlfriend's lips, her tongue, her back under one hand, her waist under the other, her hand on your cheek, her chest crushing into yours: she warms you with her alien heat.

You pull away from her when you think of the best way to phrase something clever. After a few seconds of dreamy bewilderment Rose's expression twists with impatience.

"Are you sure a matespritship is right for us?" you tease as she leans in again. You hope she is functioning well enough to process your appropriation of human sarcasm. "I recall you wanted me to show you 'ALL the quadrans.' Shall we begin with moirallegiance? Of course that quadrant will require us to abstain from this kind of flushed activity, but I'm sure we'll both meet this challenge with, uh. Hmmm."

Rose has started crawling into your lap. It's an awkward, bowlegged attempt to distract you but it's successful. It occurs to you, not for the first time, that Rose is very attractive when she's smug.

She says, "A matespiritship is enuff, my darlaling Kanaya," and this time you kiss her.

Rose, now drowsy, has requested an escort to her sleeping pile. You have to travel all the way up the stairs and back to retrieve her scattered heels, and when you guide her feet into them as gently as possible she laughs at you with unprecedented carelessness.

"What," you say. Rose isn't answering, instead using your arm to balance herself as she stands on quavering legs. Perhaps snickering at nothing is a symptom of drunkenness.

She links your arms together with surprising elegance, then slurs, "Charmaming," before stumbling over her own unstable ankles. Meaningless. But you suppose flattering you at every available opportunity isn't too bad of a habit.

You attempt to support her as firmly as possible as you both embark on the long trek to her respiteblock. You inch through the meteor's dim, echoing corridors, and Rose chatters into your shoulder the whole time. You are too preoccupied with keeping your matesprit vertical to adequately respond to her series of increasingly sentimental monologues, though you're not quite sure how to reply to admissions like, "D'you know how incomplate the Mayor wul look, whithout his, sash? Or how evem dummer Dave would look withou those doofy sunglasses he wears indours? That'sh how we, uld look. Witout each other. :)," and, "I wondrer if it's posshible for meh to halp you repopeulate your speches? :) :) :)," and, "Like I wasseying to my dipshit brother, bout symybols. Here we have the meeting of two divrurgent representatibs of "light," an idealisched phenomnom made meanergful through abstractron. My 'filation with the light aspectsh granted to me through SBURBUR. You not onlay naturorally produse light, you are also diurinal, a traits unique to you armong yer specieces. How serendipendous it is indeed that lights manufests itshelf, through us, as a romnantic stymble: i.e, you, Kanaya, are both the literall an metalphorcallight of my life. I hope I'm the same to you, :)."

"Whoa there!" you say, interrupting her after she almost steers into a wall. You've managed to reach Rose's corner of the meteor without her twisting her ankle or nodding off, and you consider this a victory. "Careful. You step into the transportalizer first. I'll follow, don't worry."

Her room is messier than usual; you help Rose navigate through an obstacle course of clothes, books, and weapons to get to her pile. You notice most of the things strewn on the floor are formal-looking dresses. There's a brief jolt of shame. All that time and grist Rose apparently spent alchemizing her outfit and you didn't even take ten minutes to iron your work clothes! You resolve to make up for this oversight later.

Rose insists upon you helping her climb into her pile, and about a dozen of Terezi's mutilated scalemates squeak at once as her body settles. You lean over her, but before you can take off her earrings her grip on your upper arm upsets your already tenuous balance and you topple into the pile, trying not to crush Rose under you.

"Kanaya," she whispers over the high-pitched protests of Madame Kiwiwing. Her syllables are softened with exhaustion. "Stay. Please."

You had planned to stay regardless, maybe keeping vigil at the desk across the room in case Rose experienced some belated consequence from her dramatic fall. This requested intimacy, however, is much more compelling.

"Stay," she pleads again, and you shift until you're no longer on top of her. "I'll be here," you whisper. Despite her very tangible proximity you hope she can hear you. You wince as another scalemate keens right into your auricular sponge clot. You're amazed Rose manages to acquire any sleep on such a noisy pile, but perhaps the squeaking reminds her of screeching horrorterrors. Next time you'll try to convince her to sleep in your fabric pile.

This is a daunting idea. Even now you're in a desperate struggle to distance yourself from your new matesprit, letting only your arms touch. Your attempt at modesty is no place for such a small pile: the ground beneath your left hip is very hard, and your shoulders threaten to slide onto the floor. Rose, oblivious, jerks onto her side and drapes her arm over your chest. In a cacophony of scalemates her body suddenly presses flush against yours, moving against you as she tries to get comfortable. You think she is doing it on purpose. You recall with embarrassment her enthusiasm for helping you restore your species' cycle of reproduction.

You're on the floor entirely now, but after Professor Plumtooth finishes complaining you're too distracted to care. Rose is unfailingly, perpetually, overwhelmingly warm. She radiates. Her temperature presses into your skin all around you, seeping through your clothes, and when she tips back her head to look you in the eyes her unfocused gaze makes your chest feel like a kiln.

She kisses you again. This time she makes more of an effort to be precise, with stunning results. You exhale into her as she gently rakes her teeth over your lower lip, and Rose responds with the short, high-pitched noise of approval she makes when she reads something that pleases her. It was cute when you were researching together; now this noise makes you feel strange, out of place. The warmth that had filled your chest to capacity only seconds before is replaced with an aching hollowness. It feels like an important part of you is missing, and touching her is the only way to keep the void at bay.

She pulls back and grips your waist, breathing hard. She murmurs something incoherent, finding the bottom edge of your shirt with her fingers and pushing it up. She makes that sharp little noise again and you feel like... like...

It isn't working. Not with her slurring so badly, struggling to focus on you with those blurry eyes.

"Perhaps we should go to sleep," you suggest, your voice sounding unusually husky. It's unbearable stalling like this; that kiss left you empty and haggard. "You must be exhausted. You fell down a flight of stairs, remember?"

She tears her gaze away from your breasts and frowns up at you. Oh, no. You hope this isn't the same kind of disappointment she directs towards the grubs in her sauce every morning. What if humans traditionally expect intimacy after an evening of alcohol consumption?

Rose, however, quickly forgives this faux pas. She paps your face and coos, "Awwwwwwwwwwwww Kanana! S'okay. I unnerstend. Youore entittled to notheng more than the most sorber of my romantit ministruations."

And she gives your cheek a placid little kiss.

"Thank you," you mumble, still feeling needy. You decide to give her an in to tease you a little. "Promise you'll make it up to me tomorrow?"

"Duh! I'm gonna make it up to you so, so good. Be papered, Karnaya."

You laugh: she didn't even try to deflect that. Before you can make a crack about decommissioning the horseshit-o-meter for good, however, she starts relaxing against you, and everything is stillness and silence for a long time. You think she murmured your name and then something about dream bubbles but it is very hard to understand her when the steadiness of her breathing is making your eyes droop like this; you try to mumble good morning as your hand falls limply on her shoulder...

"Oh! Kanaya!" Rose bolts up and grips you with enough urgency to jolt you out of your tranquil drowsiness entirely. "I'm sorry. You should be able to turn it off now," she slurs instead, and presses the tip of her finger to your nose. She makes a noise you gather must be some sort of onomatopoeia people use on Earth to intimate the synthetic sound of electronics.

You manage to say, "Is my nose a button?" through your giggling.

"May," she says, then trails off, flashing another sheepish smile. "Be."

She laughs, tapping on your nose twice: turn off the lights, Kanaya. You acquiesce, the room goes dark, and Rose presses her face into your neck again, sighing triumphantly. You don't mind the darkness so much, this time. Somehow, at this moment, the chill of insipid space enveloping the meteor isn't daunting at all.

A strand of Rose's thin hair slips from behind her ear, tickling your nose, and you are suddenly overwhelmed with the memory of grass swaying under an Alternian afternoon's sweltering heat. You remember how you used to spread yourself in the sun's rays after tending to your garden, listening to the lazy flutter of your lusus's wings as she watched over you from under the cool shade of the trees. You remember the soft give of damp soil in your palms, the waxy texture of sun-soaked leaves underneath your fingertips. You remember the sweat that trailed down the back of your neck as you hacked particularly stubborn branches off your topiaries or decapitated particularly stubborn members of an invading undead horde.

Your consciousness returns to Rose's pitch black block once it becomes impossible to ignore the moisture that's sticking your shirt to your collarbone. Rose has started to drool a little. She must be sleeping already. You close your eyes again and focus on her presence, putting aside these memories of an obsolete universe.

Rose's breathing is sultry, soft, and steadfast. You listen to the rhythm of her heartbeat, foreign to you after years of undeath. Her hand is still under your shirt, resting on your stomach, and that's all right with you. The tile is very hard beneath you but you don't dare fidget for fear of stirring her. Instead, you rake your fingers through her hair and try not to giggle when her eyelashes brush against your throat.

You remember Alternia, and you miss it still, but you're not aching to return to it any longer. You've found a new home in Rose's light, her warmth wrapping all around you.


End file.
